A long the river run, p.14
A Long the River Run, page 14
Angela thought that she would be sacked outright but the head was surprisingly pleasant. He told her that he had received a complaint from Daniela’s father, who struck the head as being an oafish and aggressive buffoon who kept dropping the names of local politicians and business people into the conversation and was demanding that Angela should be sacked immediately. The head told Angela that she would not be doing any face to face teaching in Australian Literature for the rest of the semester and that perhaps she should use the time to get some articles published as this would help her when contract renewal time came around at the end of the year. He then suggested that she should think of taking a sabbatical and that he could help with getting a university research grant because, as a non-tenured staff member, she was not entitled to a paid sabbatical and would have to use her accrued long-service leave which would only last a couple of months. The head suggested that she take a year and when Angela said that her contract would be up half way through that year, the head smiled and said that she would be offered a new contract when she got back if she was still away, and if she came back she could cut her sabbatical short if she wished but it would mean repaying some of the research grant. Angela thought that this was her opportunity to write her book about Mick, who had become her new obsession to the point that she had almost forgotten about Siobhan and Plunket and others from Caldwell Street. She decided on the spot to agree to the Sabbatical to start at the beginning of the next semester and that she would first go to England and hopefully Mick would agree to meet her and she could ask him the questions she had been dying to ask for years but had been reluctant to put into writing, fearing that Mick would find them stupid and clumsy, but if they could be part of a conversation, Angela thought that it would be so much easier.
Angela had been living on her own in a little two bedroom cottage she rented near the bowling alley in Mayfield and the man who owned it had been suggesting to Angela for years that she should buy it and her father had even offered to help with the deposit until the money from her grandma’s estate came through, where Angela would receive half her grandma’s assets and so wouldn’t need to borrow much, as her grandma’s house was worth much more than her rented cottage. In the end, Angela decided that she would take some cash to help with her travel costs and to extend the scholarship money and that she would ask her landlord if she could sub-let the house with a view to buying it when she came back from abroad. The landlord huffed and puffed a bit and finally said that she could sublet it, but she was responsible for making sure the rent was paid on time and for any damages.
There had been a small farewell afternoon tea for Angela on the last day of the semester and a number of the staff turned up and some of the part-timers came in specially and even the old Professor, who was now Emeritus Professor and pretty well retired, but allowed to keep an office, turned up and dominated the room with his loud recitations from Blake and he gave Angela a big hug and told her that he had made a list for her of all the things she should do and see in England and she thanked him and whispered that she had no regrets, meaning the affair they had for a while in the ‘nineties. The head of department had sent his apologies and said something about the Vice Chancellor calling a last-minute meeting which caused great amusement amongst the staff when the Vice Chancellor herself stuck her head in for five minutes to wish Angela the best. Before he left, the Professor told Angela that the head had planned to sack her on the spot after the business with Daniela, but the Professor told the head that he would make a fuss the likes of which the head had ever seen and it would certainly mean the head being blackballed from the Settler’s Club, the gentleman’s club on the hill that the head had been hoping to join and which the Professor sat on the board which was a strange thing to do for a left wing Geordie poet.
Ingrid had wanted to throw Angela a proper farewell party, but Angela said no because it would just make it more obvious to her that most of her friends, her real friends, other than Ingrid had buggered off overseas years ago and that she just wanted to slip away unnoticed. Instead, Ingrid said that she would drive Angela to the airport and because Angela was on an early flight to Singapore and then on to London, they would go down the night before and have a night on the town, but not too big a night because Ingrid didn’t want Angela doing her first big overseas trip with a hangover.
When the architecture show finished, Ingrid and Angela watched an English murder mystery program that they both enjoyed.
‘It took me forever to get into this show,’ Angela said as the credits rolled over the top of the spooky music and graphics that she thought were supposed to look like blood dripping off the letters. ‘I took it seriously and thought that it was, I don’t know, a bit twee and then I realised that it was, in fact, really funny with lots of black humour.’
‘That really surprises me’, Ingrid said, ‘because of everyone I know, you’re the one who can find the humour in the darkest things and the darkness in the funny things.’
‘It’s the gloomy Celt in me,’ Angela said with half a smile. ‘I’m mostly Scottish but I also have Irish in me from Dad’s mother’s side, the O’Hara’s. You know what they say about the Irish, that all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.’
Thinking of the Irish, Angela shuddered a little but not so much that Ingrid would notice, and she thought that the shudder was caused by some remnant of the ghost of Siobhan who was still inside of her and was still chasing some unfinished business in Angela’s heart, mind and soul.
Siobhan had been absent in the years that Angela was writing her thesis on Mick, The Christ of Barren Landscapes – The Redeeming Unknowable Stranger in the Fiction of Randolph Stow. Angela’s head became full of men because the books she was reading were full of men, and men who were full of troubles and ghosts and demons of their own, who inhabited mainly barren lands to such a degree that even when Mick wrote about the tropical islands to the north or the green rolling lands of Suffolk, there was always the sense of barrenness that could only be expressed, she argued, by a man who had looked out over vast landscapes and distant horizons and who, in his time and perhaps for most of his life, was lonely and isolated. There were women in the books and most of them were good women, particularly in the later works and these women were the nurturers the supporters the mothers and grandmothers who were much loved by their sometime wayward me.
Siobhan’s short life was so much different. There were no distant horizons in Surry Hills or Darlinghurst except, perhaps, the last far horizon of the edge of the Tasman Sea that Siobhan must have gazed at from the gap and, for the first time in ages, Angela wondered whether or not Siobhan stood on the edge for some time gathering her strength before taking the leap into darkness or whether she was fast, sure footed and certain.
Mick knew of suicides and breakdowns and the ‘mega crack-up’. His books were full of them, the crack ups, suicides attempted and successful, and the recovery, and Angela had sought some solace in Mick’s English story, his Suffolk fables when she was emerging into the light from her own dark days. She had read most of Mick’s books, starting with the merry-go-round book when she was still in high school and also, when she started tutoring and later lecturing, the one about the old man on the Western Australian coast. She sought out Mick’s earlier books, the books he wrote when he was still a very young man, before he found his voice as a writer, but still enthralled, captured by the vastness of the land and the smallness of the people in it and the ghosts that they all seemed to carry.
‘What was Scotland really like?’ Ingrid asked, ‘it always looks pretty in pictures and I always thought that I’d love to go there some day.’
‘The highlands are beautiful but in this strange, bleak way and sometimes eerily quiet and the weather can be treacherous and changeable and a lot of people who aren’t prepared get caught out going on relatively short hikes. Glencoe is spectacular, the bare granite hills looking over the glen, the yellow gorse and the purple heather and the wind that howls that sends a shiver up your spine like it’s the women keening for the men who were killed there all those years ago, massacred by the army for not swearing allegiance to King William after the Glorious Revolution, I think. I’m not always that good on history but when I was there, standing in the glen, hearing the crying wind, I had an overwhelming sense of sadness and started to cry and my tour guide cried too, and she said that the place often had that effect on people.’
‘Sounds depressing’ Ingrid said, ‘not what I was expecting’.
‘That’s just me. You’d love Glasgow and all the groovy bars in the West End full of uni students and musicians and artists and comedians and heaps of good bands and plenty of drinking and dancing.’
As much as Angela did the tourist things in the U.K., it wasn’t meant to be a holiday, it was meant to be work. She had packed paperback copies of Mick’s books apart from the first two which she only had in hardcover, and first editions at that, and she made sure they were in her carry-on luggage because they were rare and would be hard to replace, but she wanted to have them with her as talisman and touchstones that were connected to the beginning of Mick’s life with the pen. She spent the first couple of days travelling on the tube to all the sites and was awed by Westminster Abbey and the Tower and St Pauls, loved the Tate Modern and National Portrait Gallery but decided the cost and waiting times for the Eye were too much and that it was too much a touristy sort of thing to do. What Angela did do was set herself the task of reading all of Mick’s books over a two-week period and to do this, she would get the tube to Russell Square and walk down Great Russell Street to the British Museum where she would set herself up for the day under the dome of the large reading room and think that just by being there, she was somehow absorbing all of the history and culture, the books and songs and plays that London had to offer and that, finally, she had become not just an academic, not just a university lecturer, but a scholar.
What is Saved, What is Lost
Monday morning dawned cool and overcast and there were even some light drops of rain falling and Angela hoped that the rain wasn’t just confined to the coastline and had found its way inland, to where the fires were still burning. Ingrid had already left for work before Angela had gotten out of bed, pleased that for the first night in a long time the dreams hadn’t come crowding in to her mind, whispering in the way of dreams, swirling, kaleidoscopic, ghosts of the past flowing endlessly as she tossed on her bed.
For the second time in two days she took the road that followed the river that gave the valley its name. All the fire warnings had been downgraded and while the bush was still burning in the hard to reach ridges and valleys to the north, there was no longer any risk for any of the areas around Allynsdale and surrounds and Angela was pretty sure that she’d be able to drive up the road to see if anything was left of her house. She was certain, deep inside, that it would be in ruins and wondered how she would face that moment when she saw her house for the first time. Everything would be ruins she thought, everything she had tried to build lost to the ash that she could smell in the air, taste on her tongue, the bitter ash, and it was not yet Wednesday, and she wouldn’t know again what it was to hope that there might be something peaceful, something calm in the future, but liked the little joke that she had made with the bitterness and the ash.
She remembered that the rosary was there at the end of the poem that was about ashes and Wednesday and hope and time being time, and she thought that she would like to read that poem again and remembered that the poem was now probably ashes because she didn’t think it was one of the precious books that found their way into the carton that went into the back of her car only two days before, and she had a vision as she drove of the book seeming to open itself as the heat blast hit the house before the flames arrived, and opening on the pages of that poem in particular, and the pages curling and contracting and slowly starting to smoke until there was a bright spot of flame in the centre that soon consumed the page and the other pages and then the other books and then all those useless words that she had spent her life reading and discussing and thinking about, until all the words ended up as ashes on the floor amongst the other ashes of her life, a life where it seemed to her that all she had managed to do was to get the better of words.
She started to see the world as words, jumbled and disconnected, not forming clauses or sentences, not making any sense of anything, like a useless collection of artefacts that has ceased to have any purpose and perhaps no longer any value, and Angela thought that perhaps this is what all the ashes meant at the end of the day, that her world would be reduced to ashes and, as her world was words, they too would disintegrate into powder in the heat of the fire that had driven her from the mountain, her peace and solace. When she thought this, she was gripped with a fear that she was heading for something bigger and much worse than the mega crack up and there was a tightening in her chest and her breath was becoming more rapid and shallower and she just managed to pull the car off the side of the road before her vision started to blur and she thought ‘this is it, it’s not the mega crack up but the big one’, the heart attack that she thought was coming fast, bearing down like the firestorm off the side of the mountain.
Angela stumbled out of the car and leant on the bonnet hoping that some passer-by would see the distress that she was in and call for an ambulance and, if this happened, maybe this wasn’t really the end after all. She felt like somebody or something was watching her and when she turned her head slightly she saw, in the paddock on the other side of the fence, a grey kangaroo standing quietly, quite tall on its back legs and tail with its short front paws dangling in front, some grass in its mouth which it had stopped chewing, and its big brown eyes, quietly and calmly watching her. Angela was surprised that it hadn’t hopped away when she pulled over because the kangaroos in that area were quite skittish and were used to being shot at or chased to the point that Angela actually couldn’t remember when she had last seen a kangaroo in that part of the valley.
Angela had been told that the drought and lack of food and water was driving a lot of kangaroos out of the forests and into the farmlands and even into the towns so that the old cliché that foreigners think kangaroos come bounding down the main streets of towns was now turning from a silly joke into a sad reality. This kangaroo had probably been driven out of the hills by the fire and Angela remembered hearing stories from of the old timers like Killer of how you knew the fire front was approaching because of the wildlife desperately trying to get out of the way and how kangaroos and wallabies would come flying down the mountain in a panic and would crash through barbed wire fences and slip rails and keep hopping away as fast as they could and sometimes their fur would be singed and smoking from the flames.
Angela looked closely at the kangaroo in front of her to see if it had been injured at all and even though she was no expert on such matters, she thought that the kangaroo looked surprisingly healthy and uninjured given the drought and the fire, and its coat was shiny and not covered with ashes and she thought that it looked like it was pretty well nourished. She wondered what the kangaroo was making of her as it stared back with the occasional blink of its eye and showing no intention of moving away and it had stopped chewing the grass in its mouth so that a few straw-coloured strands just stood there between the kangaroo’s lips. Angela noticed that her breathing had slowed back down until it was almost normal and that she no longer felt the pain in her chest, and she was no longer sweating. The longer she stood there, her eyes locked into the kangaroo’s eyes, Angela started to almost feel a kind of calmness washing over her like a delicate warm wave and she was no longer frightened of what she might find up the hill and it no longer mattered and, yes, she thought, she would be very sad at losing everything to the fire, but that the feeling of sadness would, in time, pass and what she lost was only the material things that could be replaced in time, and there was something that she couldn’t put her finger on, but it was like a voice saying to her that there was something greater than words and something greater than the ash of those words and she would know what it was when she found it.
Angela straightened her back and stood up a little taller and almost at the same time, the kangaroo sat back, most of its weight on the base of its tail so that it too was a little taller and all the time it never took its eyes of Angela. Angela let out a big sigh and it was almost as if she could feel the breath pass across the space between her and the kangaroo and the kangaroo twitched its nose like it was smelling Angela’s breath and then it seemed to nod its head slightly, turn around and gently bound away down the paddock towards the creek and the little water there was and a stand of trees where the fire hadn’t reached. Angela stood watching the kangaroo hopping away and then turned and got behind the wheel of her car amazed at how, in such a short space of time, she had gone from a full blown panic attack that she thought was the precursor to something even bigger than the mega crack-up, to feeling so unbelievably calm and ready to face whatever it was that she was to face when she followed the creek up the mountain, almost to its source, and see what was left of her home.
The service station was open as Angela rolled into Allynsdale and she was glad because it reminded her that she needed fuel and if she didn’t fill the car up, she wouldn’t make it back to Ingrid’s and apart from the service station at Wallisville, there wasn’t another one that would be open later in the day until she got back to the highway at Maitland.
